Corrupted max files - my one big beef

[insleight]

Have any of you found any techniches that help to avoid corrupted max files?

I typically save different versions of the same scene in case I encounter a corrupted file (which always seems inevitable) but in my experience the more files I save of a scene, the more likely a chance for the next one to be corrupted.

I imagine a smart thing to do after the modeling phase would be to export the geometry as obj, and import it into a new scene. That might lengthen the time until I get corrupted.

It's the one thing in max that causes me frustration.
Too damn inevitable!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-9AQNx9bRI
(curse words inside)

[Clifton Santiago]

I haven't had any Max file corruption problems since maybe Max 5 or so. Maybe its a hardware problem. A faulty stick of RAM or something...

[sv]

just use incremental save....

customise > Preferences > tick Increment on Save.

and clean out your project file when the job is invoiced for, leaving only the last file, or perhaps last couple of files.

[insleight]

I really hope its not hardware. I will start using incrimental saving.

This action I am doing is conituously crashing my max:
I Extrude a curved line for curtains.
And deform the mesh resulting from, with softselection.

I managed to create this object without crashing before and saved as a different file name. This file later became corrupted. Now, going back to the file before I created the curtains, I keep crashing when making them now.

Its like max remembers that it didnt like doing that from a future file and is treating previous versions by crashing them.

Dont know if this makes any sense..

[jujubee]

It would be safe to say that for most ordinary people that deal with large scenes, this is a common occurence. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Clifton Santiago]

@ insleight: That doesn't sound like a corruption issue. Sounds more like you are running out of memory and Max is crashing. If you try to save during the crash, your file may become unrecoverable.

[DanielBrew]

It would be safe to say that for most ordinary people that deal with large scenes, this is a common occurence. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Maybe I've been lucky but I've been in my current job 5 years and most of my scenes end up over 100 Mb but I've never had a corrupt file other than when Max crashes and asks me if I want to save a copy. Most servers use fault tolerant RAID arrays of drives, I know ours do anyway. We've had drives become faulty but we've not lost any data.

Dan